Right—that double-click home thing is just a list of recently-used apps, regardless of whether they are currently running in any sense or not. It’s actually not connected to multitasking: it’s useful without multitasking, and multitasking works without it.

As for mail—I have a ton of emails stores in my GMail, but I just ignore them—it’s not a problem. The recent emails are on top, and I have no need to keep scrolling down and loading more. (But if I did want to do some mass one-time housekeeping, I’d hop on the GMail web site to do it.)

2. The iPhone can multitask two GPS apps at once! Navigon can be giving me verbal instructions, while Google Earth is tracking me “from the air” with real satellite imagery. It’s the ultimate GPS because you can mix-n-match: use the voice guidance of one, and the display of another!

Multitasking GPS is great. Over the weekend I was running google navigation in the background to get somewhere I'd not been, and running trapster on the screen to look out for cops.

It's great but possibly not great on the battery. Not sure whether it is because my TomTom is still running in background but since multitasking the battery life seems to be shorter. I want to be able to "kill" all apps but the phone most of the time, since, I need the phone.

iPhone apps don’t keep using battery when not doing something: they are “killed” (paused) when not in view. GPS apps are a battery hog because they ARE doing something, so I like that Navigon (if in the background) stops track when you reach your destination. If I want to abandon GPS mid-journey, I have to tap Cancel in Navigon. (Kind of like having to hit Pause in iPod or Pandora: leaving the app isn’t enough to stop the music.) It’s easy to know if you’re being tracked: the arrow icon in the top-bar. If you don’t see that, the GPS is powered down and you’re not burning battery. Of course, because GPS uses battery like that, I use a car charger.

I find the 4 holds a charge about as well as my 3G so far (which is to say: very well). But it recharges more slowly. Understandable since the battery’s larger. You can kill iPhone apps, but it’s pretty meaningless: the only resource they use is RAM, and the OS kills them as needed for that purpose. Just keep an eye on that tracking arrow and stop Tom Tom from tracking when not needed—I bet that will help.

(My friend with the new Droid X is already facing the same thing as my friends with other Android phones: battery dropping like a rock, and having to manually manage that hassle. Plus general mysterious failures to have it—and or the apps—do what she wants. It reminds me a lot of people fighting Windows, oddly enough. No thanks. Still worth a look for Verizon users of course.)

Battery dropping like a rock doing what? I was out all day saturday, texting, calling, emailing, shooting HD video of concerts at artscape, shooting pictures, facebook, etc. I didn't get home until after 10pm, and the phone had been off the charger since about 8 that morning and I had somewhere like 30% battery left. The battery life on this X is absolutely phenomenal, in fact it's better than I expected.

I don’t doubt it—but experience seems to be widely varied. Who knows? Install one wrong thing, and a non tech-savvy user may find the phone no longer “just works.” I can’t explain it any more than I explain how my Windows friends can get yet ANOTHER virus all the time, despite all the money and time they put into the battle, and the complete lack of downloading anything shady. But I’m still glad it’s not my problem All I know is, two of my Android friends cannot reliably receive calls because their phones are dead a large amount of the time, and the third—who just got the X—is starting to echo the same statements. If I had to guess randomly, I’d say she’s working in bright enough light that she can’t turn the screen down, and is texting constantly. Texting in the dark might solve the problem? I really don’t know.

Whenever GPS is in use on Android there's a little satellite in the notification bar, along with an icon of whatever program is using it. Soon as you reach your destination navigation stops, or as soon as you stop navigation along the way it drops GPS.

I can't imagine tom tom would be any different, but then again it could be.

Although Trapster allows you to quit from within the application itself, and a lot of android programs do. You can kill programs with the task manager, but people end up screwing themselves randomly quitting processes when they don't know what they're killing.

When I'm in the car using navigation/maps/trapster the phone is plugged into the cradle anyway, so it doesn't use any battery.

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